8X8

8x8 began in 1987 as Integrated Information Technology, founded by Chi-Shin Wang and Y.W. Sing.

The two came from chip company Weitek. The company designed semiconductors, including math coprocessors for early PCs and chips for video compression.

The name 8x8 comes from the 8-by-8 blocks of pixels used in video compression math. In 1996 it took that name officially.

Then the internet changed everything. In 2000 the company briefly renamed itself Netergy Networks and jumped into voice-over-internet phone service.

It switched back to 8x8 in 2001 and slowly became a business phone company.

8x8 sells cloud phone systems and contact center software to businesses on a subscription. A company pays per user per month to get office phone service, video meetings, team chat, and customer support tools, all delivered over the internet.

There is no phone hardware to maintain. Small and mid-size businesses are the core customers.

8x8 makes money on recurring monthly fees, so revenue is steady and predictable. Service revenue was $693 million in its 2025 fiscal year.

8x8 Work is cloud phone service, video meetings, and team messaging in one app. 8x8 Contact Center is software for running customer support teams over the cloud.

8x8 CPaaS offers programmable messaging and voice APIs that let developers add communication to their own apps. There are also integrations with Microsoft Teams and Salesforce, so 8x8 phone service plugs into tools companies already use.

8x8 grew by surviving and pivoting. When traditional office phone lines died, it moved customers to internet calling.

When cloud software took over, it bundled phone, video, chat, and contact center into one product to compete with bigger rivals. It also bought its way bigger.

In 2022 it acquired Fuze, an enterprise cloud communications company, for about $250 million in stock and cash. The idea was to move upmarket to larger customers.

The plan is to be the single vendor a company uses for all its communication, instead of stitching together five different tools.

8x8 is a small fish in a shark tank. It competes against RingCentral, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco, all of which are bigger and better funded.

Microsoft in particular gives away phone and meeting features inside Teams, which is brutal for a company that charges for them. 8x8 also took on debt through convertible notes and has spent years working to grow profitably rather than just chase revenue.

The Fuze deal brought customers but also churn, as some former Fuze clients left during the migration. Standing out in a crowded market run by giants is the constant problem.

8x8 has been publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker EGHT since 1997. It raises money mostly through the stock and debt markets rather than venture capital.

In 2019 it sold $287.5 million in convertible senior notes. It sold another $137.5 million in convertible notes in December 2021.

That debt helped fund acquisitions like Fuze. As a public company, its investors are mutual funds, index funds, and retail shareholders rather than a handful of venture firms.